China is battling one of its worst phases of the Covid-19 pandemic with cases and deaths surging to an all-time high and experts predicting the death toll to reach 1 million after the government lifted the zero-covid policy.
Despite the official death toll on the WHO website standing at 31,585 and with 28,493 new cases in last 24 hrs they don’t match the grim images of human tragedy emerging from the country and puts a question mark on the government’s willingness to present a true picture.
According to an Al Jazeera report, several cities in China are struggling with peak in cases, overflowing hospitals & crematoriums and empty pharmacy shelves after Xi government suddenly dismantled its zero-COVID regime earlier this month. Beijing has admitted the scale of the outbreak has become “impossible” to track following the end of mandatory mass testing.
Small towns and cities are the hardest hit with emergency wards struggling to deal with the massive influx of critical cases. Hospitals are turning away ambulances and patients being treated on floor.
“The hospital is just overwhelmed from top to bottom, ICU is full, “ Beijing-based doctor Howard Bernstein told Reuters. “”A lot of them got admitted to the hospital. They’re not getting better in a day or two, so there’s no flow, and therefore people keep coming to the ER, but they can’t go upstairs into hospital rooms,” he said. “They’re stuck in the ER for days.” He further added.
One of the pictures being widely shared on social media shows an overwhelmed hospital ICU ward where patients are being treated on the floor. The image shows a patient with wires attached to his body lying on the floor, assumedly because of low availability of beds and two doctors treated a patient on floor.
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The apathy doesn’t end at the overwhelmed hospital wards, long queues outside crematoriums is another dark reality which China’s official death toll and government reports are trying to hide.
In another video posted by Dr Eric Ding, he states the “Doubling time in China may not be days anymore. Doubling time now possibly “hours” says some experts — let that sink in. R is hard to calculate if doubling is <1 day because it’s hard to PCR test that fast. The point is 🇨🇳 & the 🌎 is in deep trouble.”
The videos of bodies piled up at the crematorium clearly calls the bluff on government’s zero death sham.
Meanwhile the China airports are crowded with people waiting to get out of the country after it ended almost three years of self-imposed isolation. In a snap move late Monday, China said from January 8 inbound travellers would no longer be required to quarantine on arrival in a further unwinding of hardline coronavirus controls that had torpedoed its economy and sparked nationwide protests.
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